You're on the right "track," so to speak. CGI is the ticket...with one exception. You may want to look at a templating module like HTML::Template (hopefully it will be installed on your web host) for returning the data to the HTML page. Burying your HTML in the CGI may be instructive, but H::T may be easier to adapt from whatever Dreamweaver generates. To return HTML results from CGI will require not only a knowledge of HTML, but of a more obfuscated version in CGI.
—Brad
"The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men." George Eliot