Note: The landing page builder has improved dramatically since this article was written, for a more recent review of the Infusionsoft landing page builder (and other new features) check out this article.

There was some buzz at ICON surrounding Infusionsoft's release of the new landing page builder. And if you haven't heard, well, they're rolling out a new landing page builder. You either already have access to it, or you will soon.

Here is the official release video from Infusionsoft.I won't beat around the bush - I am disappointed in what I've seen from the new Landing Page Builder. I think everyone knows the love I have for Infusionsoft, so I'm sharing that with the hopes of tempering your expectations, and giving IS some open and real feedback.Trust me, it WILL get better, but the current reality was underwhelming for me. There's a silver lining to balance my frustration, so stay with me for a minute.And remember, this is just my opinion. Based on my needs, this isn't going to cut it right now.So I'm going to stick with my third-party builder until this is a little more full-featured (I use LeadPages). I don't wanna discourage everyone from using it altogether, my official recommendation is to play with it for yourself. Draw your own conclusions as to whether or not it'll do what you need it to do.The new builder has a few things that are certainly improvements, but it also has a number of features that I see as a step backward. I'll summarize the key changes here:

Improvements:

• I think this builder can produce landing pages that are more attractive overall.
• It has increased overall design flexibility (set images as background, etc).
• I love that we get built-in access to royalty-free stock images, and we can easily add overlays, or crop these images into circles, etc.
• I really like the idea of having templates we can start from.
• I like the concept of having pre-built blocks of content that you can add and then customize.

Drawbacks:

• The new builder doesn't let you capture custom fields yet. You can use the new pages to collect first name, email, and a few other standard fields, but it doesn't allow you to collect addresses, custom fields, and many other logical pieces of data you'd want.
• I couldn't figure out how to change the alignment of text - yup, like, I couldn't easily center align the text widgets I added to the page.
• I couldn't figure out how to change the color of the text. It seems like some really basic fundamental formatting options didn't make this first release.
• I was surprised that I couldn't easily drag the content blocks around.
• I was disappointed that there doesn't seem to be a way to add custom code of any kind. This means that you cannot currently add a Google analytics pixel, or Facebook pixel, or any other custom code you may want to use to enhance your landing page.
• The video widget only seems to support YouTube (it doesn't support Wistia, and I didn't test Vimeo).

These are mostly just observations I made from the limited experience I've had with it. I need to be abundantly clear that I'm not an expert with this tool, so it's possible that some of these things are just user error on my part.Now, I'm generally a pretty positive guy, and while I'm let down by the current reality of this new tool, there is a silver lining in all this. Infusionsoft is full of bright people who genuinely care about small businesses. They recognize that we, as small business owners, need a landing page tool that meets our needs, and this is the first step in that direction.I know for a fact that they're looking to make improvements to this builder, and quickly. They're actively seeking feedback, prioritizing our suggestions, and concurrently working on the next wave of improvements. According to the release video they put out we can expect the following features to be added soon:

• Page Settings (Google and Facebook tracking etc)
• Site colors/theming
• Referral Partner Tracking
• Lead Source Tracking
• Reordering Content Blocks
• Pre-populate Contact Information
• Merge Fields

If you're able to use this builder for your business then more power to ya, but if you aren't, then take a moment to document why not, and what you're waiting for, and convey that feedback to Infusionsoft so they can help get us what we need as quickly as possible.