This paper considers the control design with prescribed performance for uncertain nonlinear systems. Different from the existing literature, the systems under investigation possess unknown control directions and nonparametric uncertainties. Even so, the control objective to be achieved is still refined, not only to ensure the basic performance on stabilization, but also to guarantee certain prescribed performance required in real applications. Motivated by the funnel control method, a time-varying stabilizing scheme is developed for the systems, to effectively handle the serious uncertainties and to successfully guarantee the states to converge to zero with a prescribed rate.