Anything you can do with a WYSIWYG HTML editor like "Dreamweaver" or other bulky programs, you can do with a text editor. The only diffeence is that you have to know what you're doing when you do it by hand. All Dreamweaver does is generate the HTML for you. There's nothing special about the files that it generates, well except for the fact that they are much bigger than they should be because it inserts a lot of HTML that isn't needed.

If you're willing, I'd highly recomend learning how to write the HTML yourself. Take a look at W3C's Tutorials for starters. There's also a good refrence here from Microsoft. Then you can take that knowledge and use CGI.pm to create what you want. It's not CGI.pm's fault that the pages don't come out the way that you want. It's just generating the HTML that you're telling it to.

Hope this helps..
Rich