A good way to display tables with sub-headlines

Question

We are developing a web tool to allow users to combine different HTML templates to project variants. Each template has specific settings that can be combined with the project variant.

The table design doesn't seem to be intuitive at the moment and we are not sure how to improve this. The check boxes contain settings of the template and the columns are the project variants. The project variant and settings have the same name in this screenshot but they don't need to. The first line means: "The template Text has the setting XML for the project variant HTML and no setting for the project variant XML".

I'd be happy for any hint or tip how we can improve this design.

Edit on August 15th: I improved the design as said in the comments to this one:

Answer 1

I would remove the color of your subheaders and emphasize this sections by a bold font style and little much more vertical space between sections.

Answer 2

Something as simple as wrapping header and content in a box could make the visual linking a lot easier for the users. Make the different sections stand out with background, border, round corners or what you see fit. What's important is to show your users in a simple way what belongs to what.

Also instead of using the same color of all headers you could experiment with different colors to make each section stand out from the other ones.

Answer 3

I would say that the styling of a fieldset would be my preferred approach in this design. A box surrounding each section would give a nice separator and along with the legend could have a subtle title. This would give off a minimal approach and would reduce page size which I believe would work well since each section is rather small, but this would allow for expansion without losing the main headers.